Not only do they not have to workers to pay taxes into the general fund that supports retired workers because of the one child policy, those people won’t have the family structure to care for the elderly. I know that it has been a great blessing to have 4 siblings to help care for my elderly parents. And in China, thanks to sex selective births, males greatly outnumber females, so the future is not looking very good either. Now, even if the one child policiy is relaxed, Chinese people are accustomed to small families and the birth rate is unlikely to rise to replacement levels. Many Americans have been envying China recently, but I’d say that right now it sucks to be China.

@ – “Few governments have ever tried to control such an intimate personal decision on such a broad scale. At times the policy has been enforced harshly and brutally; the leaders who made this decision, however, believed that this was the only way to bring the country out of some of the most shocking poverty in the world.”

You are being too kind. I suggest you read a few chapters of Laio Wiyu’s The Corpse Walker to get a better idea of Party thinking. The Party leaders were sociopathically insane. To be blunt they didn’t give a [scatological reference removed] about the human consequences of the policies they were making — and they still don’t. All they ever cared about is money and power. We must cease coddling up to these enemies of the human race. It makes us complicit in their crimes.

BTW, Wiyu has a new book out, God is Red, which promises to be good. He is an amazing writer.

Jim.

Strictly speaking, this is a war on calculus, which leads to problems with arithmetic.

How about we all make the following agreement:

Any time an economist makes a projection that assumes smooth exponential growth for more than a quarter of our typical business cycle (a couple of years), we smack them upside the head?

Or, we could lock them in a room with a medium-functioning autistic mathematician who gets violent whenever someone tries to integrate a collection of statistical data as if it were a continuous function. (But that would be unkind to the poor virtuous mathematician.)

In any case, there really ought to be a Nobel Prize in it for any economist who upends their entire discipline by introducing a better-functioning alternative to the infinite exponential curves that too many economists have used to lie to our leaders (and us).